Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance by Mark Rifkin (review)

Mark Rifkin adds to his brilliant collection of work on settler colonialism by challenging the scholarly tendency to frame settler colonialism as a consistent, already made structure or set of logics that people today simply inhabit. Rifkin contends that settler colonialism is manifested through what he calls “settler common sense,” the everyday feelings, sentiments, and practices that normalize the disappearance of Indigenous peoples. Because this common sense is not always already in existence, but constantly made and remade, it can therefore be potentially unmade. However, argues Rifkin, it cannot be unmade by simply informing people about the truth of settler colonialism, because settler colonialism structures truth itself. Through deep and engaged reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Herman Melville’s Pierre, Rifkin argues that it is possible to see how settler colonial sense is constantly recreated even when Native peoples are not present in the text at all. For instance, he explores how the depictions of nature as “wild” consolidate the common sense understanding that property, and hence entitlement to land, is created through work that makes it no longer “wild”—work being something that Indigenous peoples are incapable of doing because they ontologically cannot create property.

Rifkin’s work departs from similar texts in Native Studies that focus on the signification of the “figure of the Indian” by exploring how settler common sense is omnipresent whether or not the “figure of the Indian” is present. In this respect, his work echoes the work of Sarita See’s The Decolonized Eye, who also reads Thoreau to explore how rendering nature has the effect of disappearing even the memory of Indigenous genocide. As Rifkin states, these texts are important, not so much to reveal what authors “think” about Natives, but what templates they provide for “the conditions of possibility” from which Indigenous life becomes im/possible (17). Rifkin further engages queer theory as a means to challenge settler, straight time in order to bring into being the potential disruption that could be effected through Indigenous presentness.

In this work, Rifkin, while not arguing that settler colonialism is completely separate from racism, nevertheless refuses to “foreground race as the primary modality through which to conceptualize processes of settlement” in order to “avoid analogy with African Americans as the means for approaching settler colonialism” (24). Since the publication of this book, new works (such as that by Tiffany Lethabo King and Maile Arvin) that address the interlocking analytics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism within Indigenous Studies challenge this paradigm. This work demonstrates that anti-Blackness is a geopolitical project of settler expansion as well as a structuring logic of indigeneity itself. It further shows that analytically separating anti-Blackness from settler colonialism is an operation of anti-Blackness designed to make an anti-colonial Black struggle seem unthinkable. This work calls into question whether it is possible to analyze relationships between settler common sense and property, as Rifkin does, without an engagement of how anti-Blackness structures these relationships. Nonetheless, Settler Common Sense brilliantly explores how the “truth” of settler colonialism structures everything—from conceptions of property, to the concept of the city, to formulations of family, relationships and feeling, to time itself. It calls us to a project of what Rifkin terms “reorientation” that requires us to not simply understand the history of Indigenous genocide, but to transform our grid of intelligibility structured by settler colonialism.